Do you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?

Do you suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD)? The
increased intensity of modern life and the experiences in combat situations
have brought on enormous stress and have led many people to develop
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Hypnosis is one of the treatment methods
available to professionals and has been proven to provide fast, reliable
results in multiple studies.

A physical or emotional event can result in trauma which produces a sudden discontinuity in cognitive and emotional experience that often persists after the trauma is over. This may result in symptoms such as psychogenic amnesia, intrusive reliving of the event as if it were recurring, numbing of responsiveness, and hypersensitivity to stimuli. Furthermore, dissociative symptoms (i.e. memory loss that may involve people, places, or events, the feeling of being physically detached from the body, as if watching a movie of oneself, emotional detachment, lack of sense of self, consequences of dissociation, such as relationship struggles, loss of jobs, anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm) during and soon after traumatic experience predict later PTSD. Hypnosis can be especially helpful as hypnosis provides controlled access to memories that may otherwise be kept out of consciousness. New uses of hypnosis in the psychotherapy of PTSD victims involve coupling access to the dissociated traumatic memories with positive restructuring of those memories. Hypnosis can be used to help patients face and bear a traumatic experience by embedding it in a new context, acknowledging helplessness during the event, and yet linking that experience with remoralizing memories such as efforts at self-protection, shared affection with friends who were killed, or the ability to control the environment at other times.

In this way, hypnosis can be used to provide controlled access to memories that are then placed into a broader perspective. Patients can be taught self-hypnosis techniques that allow them to work through traumatic memories and thereby reduce spontaneous unbidden intrusive recollections.